Hackers Just Used Mirai Botnet To Shut Down The Internet Of An Entire Country

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Botnet 14, a Mirai botnet is an open source botnet which anyone can use. It uses the shaky internet of the devices and oversees an immense amount of traffic to an online website.

Recently a cyber attack on Dyn DNS which resulted in shutting down of many popular websites – Reddit, GitHub, and Netflix.This was anticipated by another immense DDoS attack of same nature on security researcher Brian Kreb’s website and OVH hosting.

This week, in the newly improvement, Botnet 14, a Mirai Botnet bashed offline internet of an entire country. Nonetheless, the target was a small one, Liberia, a little-known African country with a population of about 4.5 million sent its the internet
systems offline multiple times.

In Liberia, less than 10% of people have internet access, something which is provided by just two internet companies which share a single optic fibre cable.

Kevin Beaumont, the security researcher, was one of the first people to spot the attack and said that,”these attacks appear to be a test in nature”. He wrote about the same on Medium, demanding that the attacks were one of the largest capacity which botnets ever recorded.

The attacks were launched in short blast for few minutes, over the course of a week. The attacks were stated by a Twitter account named @MiraiAttacks. It tweets the alerts of attacks ahead with the Domains of targets.

Kevin has named the botnet as”Shadows Kill”, as it gives subtle texts and alerts security researchers. He also said that these attacks are intensely concerned as they suggest that a Mirai operator has enough capacity to kill the entire internet system of a country. And its perfect to target a little-known country to test the capacities of Mirai botnets.